Day: March 20, 2017

This supergroup comes together for the first time on Salt Task, a free improv offering. Spanning four tracks of varying length, drummer Chris Corsano, pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, and the trumpet-wielding Nate Wooley combine for a tasty set of creative music.

Courvoisier plays in her signature percussive style, with thick chords, disjointed rhythms, and undulating soundscapes. Wooley utilizes a host of unusual mouth and extended breathing techniques to obtain distorted textures. A good portion of the time it is hard to tell that a trumpet is being played, as he makes it squeal and generate noise walls. Corsano offers rolls and staggered, yet delicate, rattling and pounding. Nothing close to a steady beat emerges – he plays the drums as a lead instrument.

Rather than staying together for the entirety of the album, the trio also trades off solo and duet sections. This allows each to make their own unique contributions to the mix. For instance, the 20-minute title track provides numerous breaks involving just one or two group members expressing themselves. Still, Corsano, Courvoisier, and Wooley are at their best when playing as a collective – there is no shortage of textures and themes, as all three take idiosyncratic directions and make liberal use of musical left turns.

But if the title track is about aggressive exploration, group and otherwise, Stalled Talks, the final offering, is a more densely atmospheric piece. With Courvoisier strumming strings (piano strings?), Wooley sustaining wavering notes, and Corsano playing in a completely free fashion, the trio sums up their contributions in a compelling manner.

This isn’t jazz, free or otherwise. It is another animal entirely. Despite its near complete lack of traditional structure, Corsano, Courvoisier, and Wooley provide a harsh yet appealing 45-minute journey of creativity. One can’t help but think that if these intrepid explorers record another album together, it would be very different but just as good. Strong recommendation.

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ROBERT DICK’S RESIDENCY AT THE STONE
Running from March 21st through 26th, this will be the first time that an array of Robert Dick’s projects will be presented in New York. Ranging from completely improvised, to a project based on Robert Dick’s works that embrace improvisation within a strong compositional framework, to efforts based on collaboration. These performances all come together to put Robert’s expressive range front and center.
Tuesday, March 21 to Sunday, March 26 at 8:30 PM
Tickets $20
The Stone, Corner of Avenue C & Second Street, New York, NY

AIR SCHOENBERG: CONNECTING FLIGHTS
Radiating through time zones and geography, the program will feature compositions by Schoenberg’s mentors and influential figures of the canon (Zemlinsky, Brahms and Schubert), students (Berg, Webern and Korngold) and students of students (Schnittke and Arvo Pärt) – mapping a rich web of influences and effluences.
Wednesday, March 22 at 7:30 PM
Tickets $20, $12 students/seniors
St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, 131 East 10th Street, New York, NY

ARNOLD DREYBLATT & MV CARBON
The Kitchen welcomes back Arnold Dreyblatt in a shared evening with MV Carbon. Dreyblatt performs three of his signature works: Nodal Excitation (1979), Calculations (2005, 2016) and Spin Ensemble (2011). Carbon opens the evening by performing The Quarky Leptonic (2017), using amplified objects, oscillations, cello, magnetic tape, projection and pattern repetition/variation to experiment with the perception of space and time, as well as the biological response to vibrational frequency and light.
Wednesday, March 22 at 8:00 PM
Tickets $25
The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, New York, NY

ELLEN FISHER: TIME DON’T STOP FOR NOBODY | CURATED BY MEREDITH MONK
For the final Curated by Meredith Monk performance of the winter season, Ellen Fisher presents Time Don’t Stop for Nobody, a movement-based performance relating to the perception of age. A small ensemble of four performers, each 25-30 years apart, will collaborate during the creative process to highlight their shared experiences on the progression of growing up.
Thursday, March 23 at 8:00 PM
Tickets $15-$20
Roulette, 509 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY

ORCHESTRA UNDERGROUND: PAST FORWARD | AMERICAN COMPOSERS ORCHESTRA
The concert celebrates Steve Reich’s 80th birthday with a performance of his Tehillim, the world premiere of Paola Prestini’s The Hotel that Time Forgot, the world premiere of Trevor Weston’s Flying Fish, and the world premiere of ACO’s 2015 Underwood New Music Readings commission winner David Hertzberg’s Chamber Symphony.
Friday, March 24 at 7:30 PM
Tickets $43-$51
Carnegie Hall, Zankel Hall, 881 7th Avenue, New York, NY

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While many composers working with electronic resources these days tout the sophistication of their experiments, Tristan Perich does almost the opposite. For years he has worked with a technology he unabashedly describes as lo-fi, gritty, one-bit sound. Mr. Perich’s pieces and sound-art installations use one-bit electronics, which, if I understand it (and I’m not sure I do), involves electronic music that never has more than one bit of information at any given moment.

This New York composer gained attention last year with the release of “Noise Patterns,” which is not exactly a recording, but a small black-matte circuit board with a headphone jack on the side. Listeners who plug in earphones hear, in a way, a “live” performance of this six-track album exploring various uses of digital noise.

The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, founded and directed by Petr Kotik, presents a marathon program which uniquely combines composers from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) – Muhal Richard Abrams, George Lewis, and Roscoe Mitchell – with those associated with the New York avant-garde tradition – Christian Wolff, Petr Kotik, Jackson Mac Low, and Czech composer Petr Bakla. SEM’s collaboration with AACM began 20 years ago, when Muhal Richard Abrams invited Kotik and his orchestra to perform, and has continued until today with many commissions and recordings. The concert’s program aims to bring forth the proximity of different musical ideas and underlines Kotik’s openness to unorthodox combinations of composers, whose work he has presented in New York at SEM concerts, and in Europe at the Ostrava Days festival.

Highlights for the Bohemian National Hall concert include five world premieres: George Lewis’ Seismologic (2017) for solo bassoonist Dana Jessen and electronics; Roscoe Mitchell’s Distant Radio Transmission (2017) with the composer on saxophone, baritone Thomas Buckner, and the SEM Orchestra, conducted by Kotik; Christian Wolff’s 5 Songs with Thomas Buckner and the orchestra; and Czech composer Petr Bakla’s Major Thirds with pianist Joseph Kubera and the Momenta Quartet.

The AACM composers (Abrams, Lewis and Mitchell) will also participate in the 2017 Ostrava Days (OD) festival later this summer with their orchestral and choral compositions. OD will also present Wolff’s 5 Songs and Bakla’s Major Thirds as well as Music for 3 by Kotik. Ostrava Days takes place in Ostrava, Czech Republic from August 14 – September 2 and is one of the world’s largest summer new music programs, with 21 concerts ranging from opera and orchestral works to ensemble and solo performances.